FreeBSD 4.4 Announcement

I am very pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE,
the very very latest in 4.x-STABLE branch technology. Since FreeBSD
4.3 was released in April 2001, we have made hundreds of fixes,
updated many different components and addressed a wide variety of
security issues. We have also substantially revamped the
documentation and provided much more comprehensive release notes.
Please see the various HTML (or, at your option, text) files in the
release directory for more information.

4.4-RELEASE is available for the
i386
and
alpha
architectures and can be installed directly over the net using
the boot floppies or copied to a local NFS/ftp server.

ISO (CD) Images
---------------

We can't promise that all the mirror sites will carry the larger
ISO images, but they will at least be available from:

Where ${arch} is currently "i386" or "alpha". If you can't afford the
CDs, are impatient, or just want to use it for evangelism purposes,
then by all means download the ISOs, otherwise please do continue to
support the FreeBSD project by purchasing one of its official CD
releases from The FreeBSD Mall.
Each CD sets contains the FreeBSD installation and application package bits
for the x86 ("PC") architecture. For a set of distfiles used to build ports
in the ports collection, please see also the FreeBSD Toolkit, a 6 CD set
containing all such extra bits which can no longer fit on the 4 ISO set.

Most releases prior to 4.4-RELEASE have been team efforts, only
possible at all due to the collaboration of many different people. It
still bears noting, however, that 4.4-RELEASE was done completely by a
"release engineering team" rather than "a release engineer" and I
think it's fair to say that with 4.4-RELEASE, we've completed the
transition from having one primary person worry about releases to
having many primary people (re@FreeBSD.org)
worry about them. This is a distinct improvement from any point of view
and, I think, an important milestone in FreeBSD's progress.

In addition to myself, the release engineering team for 4.4-RELEASE
has been:

Please join me in thanking them for all the hard work which went into
making this release. I would also like to thank the FreeBSD
Committers <committers@FreeBSD.org>, without which there would be
nothing to release, and the many thousands of FreeBSD users world-wide
who contributed bug fixes, features and suggestions.